This is an unofficial
announcement of Commission action. Release of the full text
of a Commission order constitutes official action. See MCI
v. FCC. 515 F 2d 385 (D.C. Circ 1974).

Report No. ET 98-8

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY ACTION

October 22, 1998

FCC PROPOSES RULES TO MEET TECHNICAL
REQUIREMENTS OF CALEA

(CC Docket No. 97-213)

The Commission has adopted aFurther Notice of
Proposed Rulemaking (Further Notice) addressing technical
requirements for wireline, cellular, and broadband Personal
Communications Services (PCS) carriers to comply with the
assistance capability requirements prescribed by the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).
Additionally, the Commission seeks comment on an
implementation schedule for the technical requirements the
Commission proposes to adopt in this proceeding. The Further
Notice also seeks comment on other issues associated with
the Commission's obligations under CALEA.

Section 103 of CALEA generally requires a
telecommunications carrier to ensure that its equipment,
facilities, or services are capable of: (1) expeditiously
isolating, and enabling the government, pursuant to a court
order or other lawful authorization, to intercept all wire
and electronic communications; (2) providing access to
call-identifying information that is reasonably available to
the carrier; (3) delivering intercepted communications and
call-identifying information to a Law Enforcement Agency
(LEA) in an acceptable form and at a remote location; and
(4) protecting the privacy and security of communications
and call-identifying information not authorized to be
intercepted.

CALEA does not specify how these four assistance
capability requirements are to be met. It does, however,
provide a safe harbor provision under section 107(a), which
states that carriers and manufacturers are deemed
CALEA-compliant if they meet publicly available standards
adopted by industry or the Commission. While no carrier or
manufacturer is required to use a safe harbor standard, the
Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has developed
an interim standard for wireline, cellular, and broadband
PCS carriers (J-STD-025) that TIA contends satisfies the
CALEA safe harbor provision.

Section 107 (b) of CALEA authorizes the Commission, upon
petition, to establish by rule, technical requirements or
standards that meet the assistance capability requirements
of section 103. Earlier this year, the Commission received
petitions asking it to establish such requirements or
standards from the Department of Justice (DoJ)/Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Center for Democracy
and Technology (CDT).

DoJ/FBI claim that the interim standard is underinclusive
because it does not include nine necessary capabilities that
CALEA mandates, while CDT claims that the standard is
overinclusive because it includes location and packet-mode
information that CALEA does not authorize. The Further
Notice analyzes the issues raised by DoJ/FBI and CDT, and
proposes initial threshold judgments on these issues.
Specifically, the Further Notice addresses the following:

J-STD-025 Standard

In the Further Notice, the Commission acknowledges the
immense time and effort both industry and government
representatives have put into the development of CALEA
standards, noting that the Act expresses a preference for
industry to set CALEA standards, in consultation with the
Attorney General, and that the Act's legislative history
also reveals that Congress envisioned that industry would
have primary responsibility in defining standards.
Consequently, the Commission indicates that the most
efficient and effective method for ensuring that CALEA can
be implemented as soon as possible is to build on the work
that has been done to date. Therefore, it does not intend to
reexamine any of the uncontested technical requirements of
the J-STD-025 standard. Instead, the Commission states that
it would make determinations only regarding whether each of
the items in dispute (including location information and
packet-mode provisions currently included within J-STD-025,
and the nine additional items raised by DOJ/FBI that are
currently not included) meet the assistance capability
requirements of Section 103. The other elements of the
"core" J-STD-025 are beyond the scope of this proceeding.

Location Information: The Commission tentatively
concludes that location information falls under CALEA's
definition of call identifying information because location
information identifies the origin or destination of a
communication. Therefore, where location information is
reasonably available to a carrier, the Further Notice
proposes that a provision of location information to LEAs is
necessary to meet the mandates of section 103. The
Commission also seeks comment on its proposal that location
information necessary to meet section 103 would include only
the caller's cell site location at the beginning and
termination of a call.

Packet-mode Communications: The Commission
concludes that the record is not sufficiently developed to
support any particular technical requirements for
packet-mode communications and therefore does not propose
technical requirements for such communications at this time.
However, in the Further Notice, the Commission seeks comment
on a wide range of issues to develop a sufficient record.

Technical Requirements Proposed by
DOJ/FBI

As noted above, DOJ/FBI has stated that nine additional
capabilities must be added to

J-STD-025 in order for carriers it to meet section 103's
mandates and qualify as a for the safe harbor under section
107(a). The Commission has made tentative conclusions
regarding whether those capabilities fall within the
definitions expressly delineated in section 103, and has
asked for comment on the section 107(b) factors relating to
each capability. In addition, for those capabilities falling
under CALEA's definition of call-identifying information,
the Commission has sought comment on how it should interpret
CALEA's requirement that such information be "reasonably
available" to a carrier and whether, in fact,
call-identifying information needed to meet CALEA's section
103 requirements is reasonably available. The Commission
tentatively concludes that the capability to intercept
subject-initiated conference calls is necessary to meet the
assistance capability requirements under section 103(a). In
addition, the Commission tentatively concludes that the
other four capabilities listed below are call-identifying
information and proposes that, if reasonably available to
the carrier, these capabilities are necessary to meet the
assistance capability requirements under section 103(a):

Subject-initiated Conference Calls: This
capability would permit the LEA, pursuant to a court order
or other lawful authorization, to intercept, to the
exclusion of any other communications, the content of
conversations connected via a conference call set up by the
facilities under surveillance.

Party Hold, Join, Drop on Conference Calls: This
capability would permit the LEA to receive messages
indicating whether a party is on hold, has joined or has
been dropped from the conference call.

Subject-initiated Dialing and Signaling
Information: This capability would permit the LEA to be
informed when a subject using the facilities under
surveillance uses services such as call forwarding, call
waiting, call hold, and three-way, calling. , etc.

Timing Information: In those cases where the LEA
has obtained authorization to intercept both content and
call-identifying information, this capability would require
that a telecommunications carrier send call timing
information to the LEA so the LEA could associate the
call-identifying information with the actual content of the
call.

Dialed Digital Extraction: This capability (also
known as "post-cut-through digits") would require the
telecommunications carrier to provide a LEA any digits
dialed by the subject after connecting to another carrier's
service if such information is reasonably available.

The Commission proposes that the following three items do
not fall within any of the provisions of section 103 and
therefore should not be required for CALEA compliance:

Surveillance Status: This capability would require
the telecommunications carrier to send information to the
LEA to verify that a wiretap has been established and is
still functioning correctly.

Continuity Check Tone: This capability would
require that, in cases where a LEA has obtained authority to
intercept wire or electronic communications, a C-tone or
dial tone be placed on the call content channel received by
the LEA from the telecommunications carrier until a user of
the facilities under surveillance initiates or receives a
call.

Feature Status: This capability would require a
carrier to notify the LEA when specific subscription-based
calling services are added to or deleted from the facilities
under surveillance, including when the subject modifies
capabilities remotely though another phone or through an
operator. Examples of such services are call waiting, call
hold, three-way calling, conference call, and return call.

The Commission makes no proposal on one item:

In-band and Out-of-band Signaling: This capability
would allow a telecommunications carrier to send a
notification message to the LEA when any network message
(ringing, busy, call waiting signal or message light) is
sent to the subject using facilities under surveillance. The
Further Notice does not propose to either include or exclude
this feature as a CALEA requirement. However, the Commission
seeks comment on what types of in-band and out-of-band
signaling should constitute a technical requirement
necessary to meet the CALEA assistance capability
requirements.

The Commission emphasizes that while the Further NPRM
proposes only initial threshold judgments on each of the
above issues, the Commission in this proceeding -- as
directed by Congress -- will also take into account five
factors that must be considered under section 107(b). Those
factors are: (1) meeting the assistance capability
requirements of section 103 by cost-effective methods; (2)
protecting the privacy and security of communications not
authorized to be intercepted; (3) minimizing the cost of
CALEA compliance on residential ratepayers; (4) serving the
policy of the United States to encourage the provision of
new technologies and services to the public; and (5)
providing a reasonable time and conditions for CALEA
compliance.

The Commission also tentatively concludes that the
technical requirements proposed in the Further Notice can be
most efficiently implemented by permitting TIA to modify
J-STD-025 in accord with the Commission's determinations.
The Commission believes that although TIA may have to
undertake additional work to implement the technical
requirements identified in the Further Notice, TIA has the
experience and resources to develop technical specifications
and implement CALEA's requirements most rapidly.

Finally, the Further NPRM seeks comment on what role, if
any, the Commission can or should play in assisting
telecommunications carriers other than wireline, cellular,
and broadband PCS to set standards for, or to achieve
compliance with, CALEA's requirements.